ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of a global perspective of food production systems, drawing on insights from food regime theory. While there is much to be gained from an awareness of such 'globalised' approaches, it highlights their inadequacy in three ways. First, although they rightly valorise the importance of both politics and the economy in shaping and regulating the development of food production, the specific nature or the form in which the political economy of food takes shape is seldom discussed. Second, much of this work views the way food production has developed (at the broadest scale) as almost teleological. Third and relatedly, such a teleological gaze has the unintended consequence of normalising, or worse, sanctioning the very development itself. The chapter offers a contrary case study in Malaysia where local cultural politics of consumption stymie the advent of global industrial livestock production.
